I remember well how it was 10 years ago this weekend. Bloated and lacklustre, I'd stumble from home to trading floor and back again, detour the office as much as possible and try not to make any eye contact with anyone, worried they might see the deceit behind my own.

Physically drained from weeks of continual, bare-faced, lying, interrupted sleep and the overpowering stress of the situation, I would look at photographs taken just three years earlier, when I first arrived at the Singapore office of Barings Securities. Whatever had happened to that young man, freshly married, just promoted, and at the beginning of a new adventure - eager to please, eager to succeed?

He had disappeared, and had been replaced by a liar. The untruths flickered like ticker-tape, rolling over again and again behind my eyelids, too many to count, getting worse by the day as the markets moved against me. Each new day would bring only new lies.

Amazingly, I never realised quite how bad it had got, even then. I'd glance at the positions in the account I'd used to cover up the losses, and sneak a quick look at the margins that had been deposited from London - but I'd always stop short of doing the simple computation that would spell it out load and clear.

Anyone could have done the sums; there was no complex algorithm required. Barings Securities was in the red to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and I was the only person who knew it.

I never planned to run away from Singapore, but then I'd never planned any of it. Nevertheless, it was 10 years ago today that I began to think about escape. Barings people had begun to ask some serious questions at last about the huge amounts of cash that had been disappearing in Singapore. Tony Railton, a senior bank official, had found a hole in the balance sheet - not the sort you plug by putting your finger in the dyke, more like one that threatens to wash the whole dam away.

His colleague Tony Hawes, a London-based director, was on a tour of south east Asia looking at funding requirements, and was due to be in Singapore on my birthday - 25 February. But still they allowed me to fob them off with flimsy excuses for my cash-guzzling operation. I believe that they were all so desperate to believe in my success for personal reasons; their bonuses depended on it and there were only a few days before these were due to be signed off.

But still I couldn't tell anybody. The only way I could cope was to go into denial and avoid the reality of what I was doing. By 23 February it all became too much. That day, which will be imprinted on my mind forever, my then-wife Lisa and I packed a couple of small suitcases and made our way to the airport. We were still in the eye of the cyclone, but the storm was about to break over us.

Life is very different now. After extradition, conviction, jail, cancer and divorce, I've come out the other end and have forged a new life in Ireland. Remarried and with my first child, a boy, I feel life is on an upward curve again.

Bizarrely, last week, as I was remember ing afresh the events of 10 years ago, I received an inquiry from Fortune magazine about including me in an article that they are going to be running shortly. The request said 'we're doing a piece for the Fortune 500 issue on some of the business leaders who shaped the 20th century - you're at the top of that list. The piece will focus on what you're up to now and what you've learnt with the benefit of hindsight'. My first thought, I must say, was that somebody was having a laugh - and maybe they still are. I'm the antithesis of some of the other business leaders that they have decided to include in their hall of fame; but I also think my impact may be longer-lasting.

Because markets have certainly changed since Barings went bust. Open-outcry trading pits are virtually a thing of the past and have been largely replaced with automated systems. Many of the anomalies that existed on the trading floor in my day, often bordering on the illegal, have been removed, and that can only be advantageous in promoting fair and accessible markets for everyone.

I suppose that my demise at the end of February 1995 ushered in a new era of caution, improved control and better regula tion in the global financial markets. Or maybe not. There has certainly been no end to financial scandal in the last 10 years, often centred on a 'rogue trader' acting on his own, or with only a small number of associates: Kenneth Lay at Enron, Conrad Black at Hollinger, John Rusnak at Allfirst, to mention some of the more public ones.

Big corporate scandals have also resurfaced, if indeed they ever went away. Shell's overvalued reserves have badly shaken the oil giant, while in Italy the Parmalat scandal opened up a deceit involving the world's top banks and financial institutions.

And on my old stamping ground just a few weeks ago, we had the sight of Simex, the Singapore Monetary Exchange, being given the runaround by an Australian trader for $550 million of losses involving the China Aviation Oil Corporation (CAOC). Ten years after Barings, it seems Simex is still struggling to get to grips with regulating its own market. After all, they had the best case-study possible to learn from - me.

Do these organisations just simply forget? Or do they treat the products and the risks with complete disdain? I suggest the latter. Chen Jiulin, the former chief executive of CAOC, was quoted to the effect that he did not well understand the risks involved in the oil trades. Bank of America, caught up in the Parmalat scandal, said it was a victim rather than a culprit.

These sentiments were exactly those voiced by Barings executives in 1995, and prove to me that little has changed, espe cially in Singapore. It has recently been reported that an agreement to repay the creditors of CAOC may help repair Singapore's reputation, but I question how it can; they clearly have not put effective controls in place.

Ten years on, the collapse of Barings is becoming a distant memory for most people in the financial services industry. Many people regard it as a one-off disaster, or a curiosity, that could never happen again. The Dutch group ING, which bought out the crippled bank, has dropped the Barings name and it may soon disappear from the business world altogether.

I fear, though, that the lessons temporarily learnt are also being forgotten. The Bank of England, which a decade ago this weekend was sitting on an powder-keg with a burning fuse, was surely right not to have bailed Barings out. It was a comparatively small bank, poorly run, and an accident waiting to happen. But its collapse should have been a wake-up call nobody in global financial services will ever forget.

Today, my days revolve around little more than taking the dog for a walk along the beach and spending time with my family. I write occasionally, and will be publishing a book on stress this summer. The most demanding thing I do - after-dinner speaking - provides the bulk of my income and keeps me in touch with the industry that officially wants nothing to do with me.

That's fine by me. But remember: if you fail to learn from the mistakes of the past, you are doomed to repeat them. We should not forget Barings, 1995.

How scandal involved

1995: Barings collapses with previously undeclared debts of £850 million. Bank is taken over by Dutch financiers ING; Leeson arrested and given jail sentence in Singapore.

1995-99: Ten former Barings employees are disciplined by financial regulators over their roles in the fiasco.

1999: Leeson released from jail, returns to UK; later moves to Ireland. Rogue Trader , the film of his downfall, starring Ewan McGregor, is released.

2001: ING Barings reverts to being called ING. The centuries-old bank remains a name only in fund management.

2002: Coopers & Lybrand, the bank's former auditor, reaches an out-of-court settlement with Barings' creditors, who had brought a massive negligence lawsuit against it.